With their long-awaited album Book of Souls due to hit the shelves this fall, Secret Chiefs 3 have chosen this moment to bring the digital world up to date on some of the clandestine (i.e. vinyl-only) activities of the SC3 "satellite bands." In 2007, a string of 7-inch records by these groups were all snatched up by fans within just over a month, leaving many potential listeners feeling a bit left out. Web of Mimicry is pleased to announce that eight tracks from UR, Ishraqiyun and Electromagnetic Azoth have made it on to Satellite Supersonic Vol. 1, and five of them are from those coveted 7-inch records!

In true Secret Chiefs 3 fashion, these tracks were not just rehashed "as is" from their 2007 vinyl masters and hastily transferred to bits and bytes. Rather, each track was given a full studio work-over in early 2010 for this CD. The band, which is about to tour Eastern Europe, Turkey and Israel, originally intended this as a low-key tour release, but such new life was breathed into the tunes in the process of remixing them (some of them even having new and expanded arrangements) that the whole project deserved to be presented as something more substantial.

To that end, Satellite Supersonic Vol. 1 really takes off when Secret Chiefs 3 adds a brand new, previously unreleased track to the Ishraqiyun repertoire. Yep, a new one. A killer. Also, an old UR favorite from Book of Horizons (2004) abandons the Secret Chiefs 3 nest completely, in order to roost in a more UR-specific "proto-mix." No one can say whether this song jumped forward 6 years or back 26... or maybe this is the origi- nal, and the version released in 2004 is an impenetrable hyper-dimension- al layer-cake shakily built upon the more solid foundations heard here.

For good measure, one more song (this time a true uber-rarity of mysterious origin from 1998) completes Satellite Supersonic Vol. 1—a bonus track that is a nostalgic foretaste of ancient things that haven't happened yet. That's the speed of it. Seasoned SC3 listeners are accustomed to fast-moving objects in space in the form of satellite bands warping time and tonality along the impossible curvatures of the mother-band's cosmic-geometrical schemata. And they sit at the center of that universe along with the band, watching it all unfold. But now, with Satellite Supersonic Vol. 1, every listener with a CD player gets a palpable, close-up and intimate view from inside three of the wandering stars in the twinkling SC3 sky.